Statistically, more than 30% of all road casualties are pedestrians, both in Japan and in Germany. Statistics prove that there is a high danger of accidents for pedestrians within built-up areas.
According to the state of the art, driver assistance systems are known that prevent a collision of a motor vehicle with pedestrians or at least mitigate the consequences of an accident for the pedestrian.
Known approaches infer the presence of a pedestrian directly by the detection of features that concern a pedestrian. For example, pedestrians are classified directly in the image or in the sequence of images of a camera sensor and/or of a radar sensor. These driver assistance systems are based, for example, on a detection of the pedestrian by means of a video image camera system. However, the detection of a pedestrian from image data requires a high computational capacity.
As an alternative, a thermal imaging camera may be used for the detection of pedestrians. However, the disadvantage of this solution consists in the fact that a thermal imaging camera is very expensive.
A lot of accidents with pedestrians happen in places where there are conclusive features in the surroundings that help to infer the possible presence of pedestrians. Typical examples comprise pedestrian crossings or zebra crossings.
DE 10341753 A1, which is incorporated by reference herein, shows a device for detecting an approach to a pedestrian crossing in a vehicle, wherein the device generates a signal that identifies the approach, wherein the approach to the pedestrian crossing may be detected by means of a locating device (e.g. GPS) or a surroundings sensor technology (e.g. video sensor technology).